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Course Info for PHIL - 311 - 01, Fall 2023
Class number: 3096 Title: Philosophy of Medicine Department: Philosophy
Career: Undergraduate Component: Lecture Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 18 Current enrollment: 14 Available seats: 4
Start date: Tuesday, September 5, 2023 End date: Thursday, December 21, 2023 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: F: 1:30PM-4:10PM, MC - 303 Instructor(s): Theurer, Kari
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities Requirement
Course Description:
This course is a general survey of philosophy of medicine and epidemiology. After covering some preliminaries from medicine's history, we will ask: what is health? Is it an individual or collective good? What is disease? How does medicine demarcate healthy and diseased conditions? Are health and disease natural kinds or are they socially constructed? What is the relationship between medicine and biomedical science, and how do they explain? What is epidemiology, and how is it distinct from medicine? How are epidemiological models constructed, and what kind of information do they provide? Finally we will consider the role that values and socioeconomic forces play in medicine, epidemiology, and biomedical science, and how these fields might address social inequities in health outcomes.